Fancy a swim?

 

Recently on social media I saw a video of a baby’s reaction to seeing a waterfall for the first time. I’ve

always loved water pouring over an edge, which will comes from spending days on end playing in Duerley Beck in Hawes, where we walked down a cantilevered set of steps from our grandparents’ terrace to get to the river bed. There is something mesmeric about the fall of water, the change in colour, and the break in angle of slope all combining to make the waterfall, or foss / force as it can be known in the north of England. In Swindale the other weekend we had the last swim of the summer in the beck descending from Mosedale, and vowed next June to return when the air and water temperature were higher and spend a day lazing and swimming in the sun. I still get a child like joy through scrambling up through a set of falls - will the next pool be deep enough, will there be one with easy access, or will it require messy, scrambly scrabble to rocks below? We also mused on the notion of wild swimming thinking we’d never ring up friends, and say ‘fancy coming wild swimming?’ but would more likely ask, ‘we’re off for a swim up Swindale, do you want to come too?’